Second-Act Twist

Andrew Stanton, the director of “Finding Nemo” and “Wall-E,” faces the complications of live action.

Stanton says that managing actors, stunts, and scenery is like doing “synchronized swimming with aircraft carriers.”Credit Illustration by Luis Grañena

If Andrew Stanton’s career has taught him anything, it’s the power of toys, fish, and robots. Stanton was the lead writer of Pixar Animation Studios’ ”Toy Story” trilogy; he also wrote and directed “Finding Nemo,” about a father fish’s quest for his son, and “Wall-E,” about a janitor robot’s quest for a sexy probe droid. The latter films earned Pixar more than $1.3 billion, and Stanton the rapt admiration of children everywhere, as well as two Academy Awards. He explains that Nemo and Wall-E, saucer-eyed and naïve, evoke our yearning for the infantile: “Studios spend so much time and money trying to get audiences invested in characters—and it comes for free with a baby or a puppy. The younger or more animal you go, the more you imbue them with innocence.”

Squinty, damaged grownups are a harder sell. So Stanton’s colleagues were startled when he embarked on a live-action film about adults for Pixar’s parent company, Walt Disney Studios. “John Carter,” which opens in March, is based on the John Carter of Mars novels, which Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote nearly a century ago. Stanton hoped his adaptation would have the mythic sweep and zoological fizz of “Star Wars,” the action and humor of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and the grandeur of “Lawrence of Arabia.” But he had trouble explaining to his friends—and even to his wife—why he was drawn to the material, and they worried that Stanton, who is forty-five, was having a midlife crisis, an aberrant fling with a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar trophy film.

For animators, turning to live action is like driving stick shift in Britain: familiar yet disconcertingly strange. At Pixar, which has had an astonishing run of twelve straight hits, production begins only after the company has critiqued a story in reels, or roughly animated storyboards, six or seven times. They edit and reëdit before they film. In live action, you get only a few takes of a given scene—even as storms blow in and actors act out—and then you must assemble the film from a relatively modest larder of footage. “I always felt intimidated by the speed of live action,” Pete Docter, the director of “Monsters, Inc.” and “Up,” told me, before adding, loyally, “But Andrew is made for it. He can outthink and outtalk anyone in the room.”

Stanton is ginger-haired, candid, and boyishly eager. What preserves him from ingenuousness is the mulish will of a onetime enfant terrible. Whenever he faces a vexing story problem, he pulls abstractedly at his forelock, twisting it into a kind of tusk that, if he lowered his head and charged, would deal the problem a mortal blow. When Stanton was working on “Toy Story,” he argued that Sid—the kid next door who blows toys up—is more normal than Andy, the gentle soul who owns Woody and Buzz. “I was Sid,” he says. “The happiest moments of my childhood were when my toys broke, because then I could destroy them with impunity.” In the Pixar films Stanton has guided, the children are mostly destructive and the adults mostly feckless—leaving a moral vacuum that only a guileless doodad can fill.

John Lasseter, the director of “Toy Story” and “Cars,” is Pixar’s public face, its Walt Disney. But many at the studio, including Lasseter, see Stanton as their Scheherazade. Jim Morris, who runs Pixar’s daily operations, told me, “Among all the top talent here, Andrew is the one who has a genius for story structure. It’s as if he sees a diagram on the wall and he knows that if a character does x in Act I it won’t be possible for him to do y in Act III.”

When I first visited Stanton, in April, he was doing some reshoots on the Playa Vista lot, near the Los Angeles airport, and he was in a gregarious mood. He led me around his Martian dioramas as if he were the archeologist who’d discovered them, nudging my elbow to indicate various gee-whiz details. In mid-tour, he whipped out a Moleskine notebook and sketched a pan for his cameraman, adjusted his second-unit director’s framing of a map, reviewed the last take with his film editor, then veered off to his iPod to blast David Bowie’s “Changes” over the sound system. All that was missing for full sensory immersion was a gift pack of Martian scent strips.

As the cameras reset, Stanton sat with his stars, Taylor Kitsch, who played the troubled heartthrob Tim Riggins on “Friday Night Lights,” and Lynn Collins, a Juilliard-trained actress in her first major role. Collins mentioned an interview she’d given about the film, in which she’d dispensed only sweet nothings. “What I didn’t want to say is ‘We’re doing a reshoot.’ ”

Kitsch said, “Or even ‘We’re doing a few pickup shots’—because they’ll fucking nail you, like the movie is doomed.”

“Reshoots should be mandatory,” Stanton insisted. “Honestly, if we had the time and everyone was available, I’d do another reshoot after this one.” When I said it sounded as if he longed for the old studio system, he replied, “That’s exactly what Pixar is! And some of the Pixarness we’re trying to spread at Disney is ‘It’s O.K. to not know, to be wrong, to screw up and rely on each other.’ Art is messy, art is chaos—so you need a system.”

Burroughs’s original story needed a system badly. John Carter is a Civil War hero who is accidentally teleported to Mars, where he befriends a doglike creature, falls for a Martian princess named Dejah, and battles to bring the planet’s civil war to an end. All this is good red-blooded stuff, and Carter’s ability to hop vast distances on the lower-gravity planet made him the original superhero, the progenitor of Superman and Flash Gordon. Yet a half-dozen earlier adapters had been defeated by the requisite special effects: Carter exists in a world—Barsoom—of light-powered airships and shape-shifting Therns, as well as red people, white apes, and green Tharks, nine-foot-tall creatures with four arms, tusks, and anger issues. The task of adaptation was further complicated by Burroughs’s racial bushwa, Mad Libs terminology (“Sab Than, the Jeddak of Zodanga” turns out to be fill-in-the-blanks for Villain’s Name, the Ruler of the Bad Guys), and general barminess.

Stanton prepared as if he were going to scale Mt. Everest. After he and another writer spent two years cutting trail, he brought in the novelist Michael Chabon as a guide for the final ascent. Their repeatedly revised script toggled between planets and time periods, kicking off with Carter’s mysterious death on Earth, in 1881, and then shifting back to 1868, when he was zoomed to Mars after he shot an interloping Thern and touched the alien’s transport medallion. We track how his desire to return to Earth evolves, after he meets Dejah, into a need to rescue her and derail the Therns’ plot to foment perpetual war. Countless gears and flywheels had to be lifted from Burroughs’s wheezy Rube Goldberg device and fashioned into a humming Rolex. Chabon told me, “Having a director who’s also a writer hire someone to rewrite him—firing himself, to some extent—is very rare.” But Stanton viewed it as enlightened self-interest. “I’m really good at structure and collaborating, but Michael is just technically, poetically, and intelligence-wise a better writer,” he said. To ready himself to direct, Stanton dropped twenty pounds, ran fifteen miles a week, and, once on set, vowed not to go to his trailer or even sit down unless absolutely necessary: “I didn’t want to look like the privileged animation geek who’d cheated his way to the top.”

The hard part of the adaptation, the “world build,” proved relatively easy. Stanton was able to create a convincingly strange Mars in the Utah desert, and he breathed life into the Tharks, Carter’s captors and eventual allies, with an ingenious lost-actor process. He had Willem Dafoe and Thomas Haden Church perform on stilts wearing “head cams” that filmed their faces, then wiped the actors out of the frame and applied their voices and facial expressions to computer-animated green warriors.

It was the supposedly simple part, the characters and the story, that got lost. In December, Stanton showed a two-hour-and-fifty-minute cut of the film to Disney and Pixar executives, a check-in known as a Braintrust meeting. At most studios, filmmakers try to keep the execs at bay, but at Pixar the Braintrust of six to twelve story gurus is intimately involved in revising every movie—“plussing” it, in Pixar’s term. The group liked Stanton’s major innovation: turning Carter from a reactive bruiser into a damaged misanthrope who’s haunted by flashbacks to an earlier marriage—a tragic hero who draws trouble down on everyone he meets. But they were confused by the film’s beginning, in which Princess Dejah delivered a lecture about the state of the Barsoomian wars, and they found her arch and stony. Worst of all, the film didn’t feel personal. Stanton films have a particular stamp: “They’re clean and clear, with an ornery-trickster quality to them, a sort of Tom Sawyer orneriness,” Bob Peterson, who co-wrote “Finding Nemo,” says. They draw deeply from the artesian well of Stanton’s childhood, and you can feel his love for his wife and his son and daughter onscreen. This time, thus far, not so much. John Lasseter asked Stanton, “What are people going to hang on to and care about?” Stanton’s younger brother Nate, a Pixar story artist, told me, “The first cut felt like one of our movies that we’d then go reboard”—or heavily revise.

The Braintrust suggested a fix for the opening: why don’t we discover Mars through John Carter’s eyes, when he arrives? “That’s lazy thinking, guys,” Stanton replied. “If I do that, then thirty minutes in I’m going to have to stop the film to explain the war, and Dejah, and who everyone is, and we’re going to have even bigger problems.” Stanton is famously candid in other people’s Braintrust sessions, and famously prickly in his own. Lee Unkrich, who directed “Toy Story 3,” says, “Andrew is the guardian of the character of Woody,” the pull-string cowboy who wrangles the other toys. “Woody feels he has to lead and stubbornly adheres to his decisions, then has to untangle himself from the resulting mess—all qualities that are to some extent true of Andrew.”

Stanton and his writers came up with their own fresh opening: we briefly meet the warring Martian tribes in mid-battle and see the evil Zodangans receive a deadly nanofoam gun from the even worse Therns; only then do we cut to Earth and meet John Carter. But that was just the beginning of their attempt to overhaul a story that was already largely committed to film. Stanton storyboarded a group of new scenes and cut them into the film to convince Disney—or, as he put it, to “preëmptively prove”—that they would hugely improve the narrative. The studio acceded, and in April he began an unusually extensive (and expensive) eighteen-day reshoot.

One afternoon on the Playa Vista lot, Stanton was prepping a scene on the narrow ledge of a Thark temple. Carter and Dejah, who’d met earlier that day, warily agree to escape the Tharks and journey together to the shrine at the Gates of Iss, where Carter hopes to learn how to get home. The director listed the mistakes he’d made the first time. “The scene was matter-of-fact: if we light them pretty, you’ll think they like each other,” he said. “We didn’t take advantage of the small ledge for them to be intimate on. And we’d buried the lead—we hadn’t told you till later that Dejah was running from a forced marriage to her enemy, Sab Than, so she came across as unsympathetic. It’s my usual weakness, being too oblique. On ‘Finding Nemo,’ I originally had this whole slow reveal, in flashbacks, of the barracuda having eaten Nemo’s mother, which, as you never understood until the end why Marlin”—the father—“was so overprotective, made him totally annoying.” He shook his head. “It’s surreal how ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ can so easily become ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ ”

Taylor Kitsch lounged on the temple ledge, having his cordwood biceps misted with silicone spray, while Lynn Collins had her skim coat of tattoos and red shellac retouched. Stanton hovered alongside, as intimate as a pickpocket. He was following Steven Spielberg’s advice (“Get as close to the actors as you can”) and also his natural inclination. Kitsch can get broody, so Stanton strove to make their relationship feel like a two-buds-just-chilling hangout. The actor told me, “I fight with my director on every film, fight out of passion—but I never had a fight with Andrew, even on day eighty in the miserable fucking desert, because I respect him so much.”

Stanton playfully mashed up some dialogue from the scene, mimicking Kitsch’s sultry whisper and adding an overlay of the stoner drawl he himself used as the voice of Crush, the sea turtle in “Finding Nemo”: “What if I could take you to the gates, mon, and you were, like, ‘Earth, dude.’ ” After Kitsch laughed, Stanton waited a beat and casually added, “I need Sarkoja”—their Thark guard—“to have heard you for the next scene, so see if you can find a justification to speak a little more loudly.” Kitsch raised his intense murmur about two decibels, and the resulting take was both more casual and more sexually charged.

The following morning, the crew moved outdoors to reshoot the landing after Carter bounds into the sky to catch a falling Dejah, a move known on set as “the Superman catch.” Stanton directed his crane operators to shift a green-screen backdrop so he could capture the scene from a better angle, and told a stuntman to unspool the wire that dropped Carter and Dejah faster, then faster still. (Stanton later told me, “The conflict between safety and the collective belief of how superhero physics should work drove me nuts.”) He repeatedly moved a light-reflecting bounce card, trying to avoid irritating Collins’s eyes—she was blinking at just the wrong moment—and then had to wait half an hour for the sun to stop flaring off the camera lens. “Juggling weather and stunts and light and green screens—it’s like trying to do synchronized swimming with aircraft carriers,” he observed.

Still, he said, “This is what I wanted—after two decades in animation, I was spontaneity-starved.” And he couldn’t resist adding, “We came on this movie so intimidated: ‘Wow, we’re at the adult table!’ Three months in, I said to my producers, ‘Is it just me, or do we actually know how to do this better than live-action crews do?’ The crew were shocked that they couldn’t overwhelm me, but at Pixar I got used to having to think about everyone else’s problems months before all their pieces would come together, and I learned that I’m just better at communicating and distilling than other people.”

Sean Bailey, the president of production for Walt Disney Studios, was startled by Stanton’s “my kung fu is stronger than yours” approach, but he soon became an admirer. “Andrew is the opposite of the usual ‘We prep it, we shoot it,’ ” Bailey said. “He’s always dropping in new storyboards and scenes—it’s the Japanese idea of kaizen, a continual process of improvement. Any scene that’s an eight he’ll tear up to try to make a ten.”

Stanton’s home office, in Mill Valley, north of San Francisco, is a tidy, three-dimensional to-do list. Pinned to the crosspieces of his bookshelves are index-card reminders: “Inevitable but not predictable,” “Conflict + contradiction,” “How they choose is who they are,” and, in a different vein, “I don’t want success to follow me home.” It’s the office of a workaholic and a defender of the faith. Where Lasseter is Pixar’s beaming dad, Stanton is the noogie-dispensing firstborn who keeps his siblings in line. He once told Lee Unkrich, “I’m the older brother you never wanted.”

“I’d only known Andrew from Braintrust meetings when we started on ‘John Carter,’ ” Mark Andrews, who helped Stanton write the first drafts of the screenplay, says. “Friends who’d worked with him told me how collaborative he was, and I now realize that’s completely true. But back then I said, ‘Really? Really, he’s collaborative? Because he doesn’t come across as collaborative. He comes across as an asshole.’ ” Someone had to be: “Toy Story 2,” “Ratatouille,” “Cars 2,” and the forthcoming “Brave” were all going so badly, midway through, that their directors had to be replaced. Michael Arndt, who wrote the screenplay for “Toy Story 3,” observes, “Andrew’s primary allegiance is not to his fellow-filmmakers, or the characters in the story, but to the audience. When you look at things through that lens, there’s an imperative to be harsh.”

Stanton’s precepts are often invoked at the studio, particularly “Be wrong fast” or “Fail early.” He explains, “It’s like every movie is a kid, and no kid avoids puberty. Just dive through it—get that outline that should take three months done in one, so you get the inevitable bad stuff out of the way and have more time to plus the good stuff.” Another Stantonism is “Do the opposite”: if a woman is going to spurn a marriage proposal, Stanton will open up possibilities by wondering, “What if she said yes?” He urges writers proposing a fix for a balky scene to “finish the sentence”—to follow their change’s consequences to the end of the movie, to insure that it works throughout. His byword, though, is not tactical but emotional. Pete Docter, whose first directing job was “Monsters, Inc.,” says, “I thought the film was about clever ideas and bits, and Andrew kept saying, ‘What makes me care?’ ” A loyal dog or a syrupy score won’t do it. Lee Unkrich remarks that if Stanton “feels a filmmaker is telling him how to feel, you can see the red rising in his face—the red-thermometer face.”

Stantonisms are the closest thing Pixar has to a secret sauce. Michael Arndt, who came to the studio shortly before winning an Academy Award for his “Little Miss Sunshine” screenplay, says, “I thought they must have some foolproof system, some big Pixar story machine, but they actually just make it up each time as they go along. Pete Docter’s analogy is ‘Everyone holds hands and jumps out of the airplane with the promise that they’ll build a parachute before they hit the ground.’ ”

Yet there is also a purely mechanical aspect to audience arousal. Stanton’s home office displays the black field binoculars that inspired the face of Wall-E, the unlikely star of his 2008 film. He borrowed them from a friend at a Red Sox-A’s playoff game in 2003, then tuned out the game altogether: “I started bending them at the hinge and making them go happy and sad, and it began racing at me how I used to do that with my father’s binoculars. John’s Luxo lamp”—the architect’s lamp from Lasseter’s first Pixar short—“only goes up and down, but the binoculars’ fold would give me just enough feature and depth to hold your attention for a full-length film. The art directors later added an iris, which was a surrogate for eyebrows, and eyebrows are the feature, in people, that tells you that someone is thinking, that they’re alive.” (Fish don’t have eyebrows, either, yet on “Nemo” Stanton’s animators paid a lot of attention to “eyebrow mass.”) He considered his prize fondly: “I literally stole the flat brow of this pair, and the sad-sack bags under the eyes, the Buster Keaton quality that gave you a default sadness.”

The Braintrust was effusive when it saw the first reel. “It ended up haunting me for the rest of the film,” Stanton said, “because nothing else went easily. In fact, I don’t think I’ll ever make anything that will feel as divinely dropped in my lap as the opening of ‘Wall-E.’ ” The first reel has almost no dialogue. Lasseter says, “It was classic animation, where, as Chuck Jones”—the great Bugs Bunny director—“always said, ‘You should be able to turn the sound off and know what’s going on.’ But it also scared the crap out of Disney, and us, because our idea until then had been ‘Great animation has big stars saying witty dialogue.’ ” Stanton made audiences care about his workaday robot with exquisite storytelling and clockwork gags worthy of Keaton himself. In one scene, set in a derelict supermarket, Wall-E accidentally dislodges a bunch of shopping carts, which pursue him down a ramp as he flees in terror. When my five-year-old daughter watched it, she bent completely double, laughing as hard as I’ve seen anyone laugh.

Wall-E’s roll home at the film’s outset was a two-minute tour de force: we notice that the entire deserted landscape—banks, gas stations, soft drinks—bears the brand of a corporate government called Buy N Large. Wall-E rolls over a tabloid Buy N Large Times, and we see “TOO MUCH TRASH!!! EARTH COVERED.” He pauses to scavenge a caterpillar tread from one of the rusted-out Wall-E units that litter the scene, then tools on past a Transit terminus, where motion-sensitive screens pop up to explain that there’s room in space for everyone, with “BNL Starliners leaving each day—we’ll clean up the mess while you’re away!” We learn that Wall-E is alone and resourceful, who made him and why, and where everyone went. Those two minutes took Stanton and his twenty-person crew six months of work.

Stanton was given a large assist by Pete Docter, who first proposed the film, then called “Trash Planet,” and twice tried to develop it himself. “I had the cool Act I that Andrew inherited and plussed,” Docter says. “What I failed at, and what Andrew cracked, was Act II: where do they go?” Originally, Stanton had Wall-E working on an alien planet and venturing into space to find alien gel people who spoke a daffy language taken from the IKEA catalogue. “The me before I came here would have stopped at the jello people,” Stanton said. “That Monty Pythonish stuff was what naturally came out of me.” With nudging from the Braintrust, the alien gels finally became tubby humans on a Starliner.

Even after Stanton found the film’s proper locale and established the love interest—the probe droid Eve—he and the Braintrust continued to be stumped by exactly how to place Wall-E in jeopardy at the end. Michael Arndt recalls, “We spent two years with Eve getting shot in her heart battery, and Wall-E giving her his battery, and it never worked. Finally—finally—we realized he should lose his memory instead, and thus his personality.” Stanton concludes, “We’re in this weird, hermetically sealed freakazoid place where everybody’s trying their best to do their best—and the films still suck for three out of the four years it takes to make them.”

By dint of terrific labor, he and his crew were eventually able to make the second act of “Wall-E” perfectly acceptable. In one breathtaking sequence, Wall-E uses a fire extinguisher for locomotion so he can dance with Eve in space, but the rest was a lot of hectic milling and chasing—Pixar’s default mode. If the studio’s films have a recurrent flaw, it is Hollywood’s flaw, magnified: a ceaseless need to entertain. When I suggested as much to Stanton, he replied, in a tone of mingled defensiveness and acknowledgment, “With each passing year, the difference between the beginning and end of ‘Wall-E’ and the middle gets less and less egregious to me. Anyway, it’s a wonderful, privileged problem to have. I get to make so many things that there may be a clichéd Pixar look. Oh, poor me.”

Nearly every weekday morning for two years, Stanton had videoconferences with the three London-based effects houses that were populating the imaginary gardens of Barsoom with real Tharks. After screening their efforts, he’d sketch improvements on his tablet: “Scene 600 needs to be rowdier—there’s too much staticness in their midsections.” And “Just make sure the inside lining of the hatching egg is also wet and mucus-y.” And, of one crowd scene that left me vaguely uneasy, “Perfect, except these Tharks on the opposite sides of the frame, and this one in the middle, are swaying in unison. Desynchronize Thark sways!”

In the afternoons, he and his editor, Eric Zumbrunnen, tightened the film. The reshoot had solved some problems—making the beginning an amuse-bouche rather than a rebus; clarifying and strengthening the Carter-Dejah bond—but, in doing so, it had brought into relief a difficulty endemic to all stories: the middle. “It’s gone from a second-act overweight problem to a second-act slump to what we’re hoping is only a second-act sag,” Stanton told me. Any novice could start a film off or bring it to a conclusion, he said, just as “any person with decent observation skills can probably deduce if you’re sick or not. But only a doctor can diagnose what’s truly going on. You can’t fake the middle of your story: if you haven’t achieved a deep enough understanding of what you’re doing, it will always reveal itself in the middle.”

One afternoon in May, he and Zumbrunnen sat in a production office in Berkeley, fine-tuning a second-act sequence known as “Dump Dejah.” Carter and Dejah have escaped the Tharks, and she is guiding him toward the Gates of Iss. When Carter discovers that they’re actually heading toward her home city (where she hopes he’ll fight for her tribe), he dumps her off her mount, a galumphing Thoat. In the initial version of the scene, she’d seemed imperious for tricking him, and he’d seemed brutal for tossing her off. Only then—too late to make us warm to her—did she explain that she was fleeing Sab Than’s proposal. The reshoot solved that problem but created another. “Since we already know why she’s running, what’s the point of this sequence?” Stanton said, draped on a couch as Zumbrunnen sat at his Final Cut station. “I need to see her vulnerable, and then I would buy that Carter was starting to fall for her. And we realized that if he’s conning her that he’s going to dump her and leave her, it makes what he does O.K.” In a new insert, Carter murmurs to their Thark companion, “Just play along,” before he gets tough with Dejah. And Dejah has a new line that links her private fears to nobler concerns: “I was afraid, weak—maybe I should have married, but I so feared it would somehow be the end of Barsoom.”

Stanton watched carefully, sipping a Diet Coke. “Subtle changes, but I think they make a big difference,” he said. “I’ve always felt you unearth story, like you’re on an archeological dig. Stories tell you what they are—you don’t have a say in what bones you’re going to get, and when. You just have to have the intestinal fortitude to acknowledge, Oh, my stegosaurus is actually a T. rex. The demon I’m chasing is ‘Can I figure out what my story is before I run out of time?’ ” The print would lock in two months.

Stanton asked Zumbrunnen to linger on Carter’s reaction when he learns that Dejah is a princess. The editor tapped a few keys and cued it up: Kitsch took the news in and smiled—and then his smile curled toward a smirk.

“No!” Stanton said. “I went from loving him to hating him.”

“Shouldn’t have followed my instincts,” Zumbrunnen said, dryly.

“Fear your instincts!” Stanton cried, only half joking. The composer Thomas Newman, who scored Stanton’s earlier films, told me, “On ‘Nemo,’ I said it was so cute and funny when Dory”—the blue-tang fish voiced by Ellen DeGeneres—“is talking whale talk. And Andrew said, ‘Oh, we stopped laughing at that a year ago.’ You become inured to the feelings provoked by your movie, a few years in, and you have to rely on memory and confidence.”

Even as Stanton banked on that confidence, he knew that Disney didn’t fully share it. He’d always planned to make a John Carter trilogy, but the studio hadn’t yet green-lit a sequel, and didn’t seem eager to discuss the topic. It also nervously lopped “of Mars” off the film’s title, to lower the barrier between women filmgoers—who are famously averse to sci-fi—and Taylor Kitsch’s smoldering aura. Disney’s caution was perhaps understandable; earlier this year, the studio’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” grossed more than a billion dollars around the world, but made only a small profit because it was so expensive to produce and market. “John Carter,” which will be nearly as expensive, will have to earn about seven hundred million dollars to justify a sequel.

Stanton screened “Dump Dejah” again, wondering, “What am I not seeing?” He ran his hands through his hair, sharpening his lance against unseen enemies. “I couldn’t get up in the morning or get to sleep at night if I thought perfection was possible. In between, though, you have to trick yourself into believing it is possible, which is dangerous.” After watching it twice more, in silence, he surfaced to ask, “Is today Thursday?” It was Tuesday.

Just when Wall-E starts to admire the probe droid Eve in flight, she wheels and blasts him with her wing gun. This, in a nutshell—moony sap woos feisty babe—is Stanton’s narrative of his courtship of his wife, Julie. Over dinner at El Paseo, a snug restaurant a mile from their house in Mill Valley, the Stantons recounted their origin story, set thirty years ago in the seaside town of Rockport, Massachusetts. Julie, who now runs a local arts-and-crafts store, told me, “I have to say that I did not have the thunderbolt moment Andrew did. He was drawing me squirrels and rainbows and anthropomorphized grapes, kind of desperately hoping I’d find them cute. He’s an incurable romantic—”

“—trapped in the body of a cynic,” Stanton said. “Our first date, I was fifteen, you were thirteen—”

“Ellen’s Harborside, on the wharf—”

“I was so nervous I couldn’t eat, and the waitress pointed that out, and then the town crazy lady came and hissed at us.” Stanton shivered, as if she might suddenly reappear.

“My parents wanted me to break it off, saying, ‘He’s older and he has long hair and he does drugs.’ ”

“I did have long hair, and I hung out with the druggies, but—”

“—they were seventh-generation there, and very townie, so the long hair . . .” Yet Julie defied her parents, and the lovers have remained together, to her continuing surprise.

Stanton’s parents had made a calculated decision to raise Andrew in Rockport, where artists and fishermen mingled easily. Andrew’s father, Ron, told me that they’d relocated from nearby Wellesley after Andrew was born, in 1965, because “folks there are predominantly rich and white, and interested in being richer and whiter than their neighbors, which is a terrible environment for a child.”

By the time Stanton’s identical-twin brothers came along, five years later, it was clear that Stanton was precocious. His mother, Gloria, who gave up acting to have a family, says, “I took Andrew to his first animated movie, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,’ when he was three. Afterward, he said, ‘Mommy, I do that. I make movies like that.’ ” Stanton says he always had an animator’s sensibility: “I can’t remember not thinking that my bike was cold in the rain, that fish are lonely in their bowl, that leaves are frightened of heights as they fall.” Gloria recalls, “We realized that Andrew had multiple talents, and we could easily raise a little monster, so we were very conscious about not making him into a spoiled child prodigy”—an issue accentuated by his flighty behavior, which would nowadays be diagnosed as attention-deficit disorder.

Ron Stanton was one of the founders of Hycor, which did confidential radar work for the Department of Defense. He was often away and usually tight-lipped when he was home—“a classic authoritarian figure,” Andrew’s brother Nate told me. Julie Stanton says, “When Andrew had done something wrong, his father never needed to say anything. He’d just come stand in Andrew’s room, silently, and Andrew would tell him everything.”

Gloria was the fun mom all the neighborhood kids loved, but it was Ron’s approval that Andrew sought. And it was Ron who introduced him to science fiction, including the John Carter novels. “I place a lot of value in stuff that won’t leave my head,” Stanton says, “and those characters stayed with me: the Thark best friend, the loyal dog that was an alien creature, this woman he was fighting not to lose. The books seem to hook a lot of boys when they’re in the formative preteen years.”

In high school, Stanton did a lot of acting and directed his friends in anarchic skits for Super-8 films they called “The Silly Show.” After a year at the University of Hartford, he transferred to the character-animation program at California Institute of the Arts. Ron Stanton recalls, “It wasn’t until late in high school that you could see that Andrew had an ability to look at other people’s flaws and get them to take that oxymoron ‘constructive criticism.’ His talent as an animator was pale in comparison to his colleagues’ at CalArts, but he had timing, a sense of how to make things work. There are some people who have a knack for creating confidence where no confidence is justified, who can inspire a solution to the problem simply by believing a solution can be found.”

Two weeks after Julie graduated from Georgetown University, in 1989, she and Stanton got married. They settled in Los Angeles, where he’d got a glamorous, welcome-to-show-biz job animating sperm for a sex-ed film with Martin Short. After Disney rejected him three times, however, he began to wonder if he was cut out for animation. Then, in 1989, John Lasseter, a CalArts grad who’d loved Stanton’s student films, asked the younger man to join him as Pixar’s second animator. The company, which Steve Jobs had bought three years before, had begun producing digital commercials. “We did boxing Listerine bottles, and I was happy as a clam,” Stanton said. “I really looked at John like he saved my life.”

As the company grew from thirty-eight employees, in 1992, to more than twelve hundred today, Stanton’s responsibilities grew with it. When Pixar began developing “Toy Story,” its first feature, in the early nineties, Lasseter brought in some Hollywood screenwriters to shape the story. Feeling he could do better, Stanton quietly versed himself in the discipline: one shelf of his home office is filled with classic screenplays—“Ryan’s Daughter,” “Schindler’s List”—that are scored with a yellow highlighter wherever he spotted a lively verb, a tone seized on the wing. He read and reread Lajos Egri’s “The Art of Dramatic Writing,” which taught him to distill movies to one crisp sentence before making them. For “Finding Nemo,” it was “Fear denies a good father from being one,” and, for “Wall-E,” “Love conquers all programming.”

Pete Docter says, “Until ‘Toy Story,’ Andrew seemed happy-go-lucky and even lackadaisical, relying on his humor to get by. Then he got annoyed with the screenwriting we were getting and really applied himself and became the main writer. The rigor and structure he brought to that film now oozes out of every pore of every film we make.”

As he began to realize his value, Stanton increasingly wished for wider recognition. Julie Stanton told me, “Andrew can never get enough acknowledgment, so he’s very susceptible to flattery. What I’ve said to him—which he does not like—is ‘When is the wonder of it over? Two Oscars, O.K., “Nemo,” one of the most loved animated films ever—people like you.’ ” When she made a similar point over dinner at El Paseo, Stanton, who often offers up his recollections pre-interpreted, said, “My parents were very spartan with compliments, so my private demon is ‘Can I make something so good that people can’t help but be effusive?’ ”

“Your dad has a Nemo flag on his boat, but he’d never talk to you about it,” Julie said.

Stanton frowned and sighed. He’s grown close to his father in recent years, and even sports a similar beard. “To give my parents credit,” he said, “they did instill my love of movies. They took me to everything from ‘Jaws’ to ‘The Tin Drum,’ and it had a huge effect. I’m always trying to get an art-house feeling into a blockbuster.”

“Have you ever asked your parents what they think of your work?” I said.

“That wouldn’t count,” he said, horrified. “It has to be pure, unprompted praise.”

Early one morning in July, Stanton drove to Skywalker Ranch, the site of George Lucas’s post-production studio, in Marin County. He was going to show “John Carter” to the film’s composer, Michael Giacchino, who won an Academy Award for his haunting score for “Up.” Usually, a director lets the editor or the music editor cut in the scratch music—a working score of magpie bits from other movies—but Stanton had done it all himself. “My favorite thing is sessions with the composer,” he told me. “It’s therapy for the film—and it forces you, in explaining what music you want, to realize what your film is really about.” The film was now a relatively svelte two hours and seven minutes, but it was still a hodgepodge of finished scenes, half-animated ones, and storyboards that only gestured toward the fireballs and Martian tableaux to come.

In a Skywalker sound room, Giacchino sat alongside Stanton as the director explained, “There are two plans at work, and the clock is ticking on both. The audience knows about the Therns’ plan—and that should maybe have one theme, which I made the choral music from ‘Perfume’—but there’s also Carter’s secret plan.” He continued, “The other thing I tried to track was the maturation of John Carter, from being John Carter of Earth to accepting being John Carter of Mars.” Giacchino nodded.

When the film began, with Willem Dafoe providing a voice-over about the warring tribes on Mars as the camera spiralled toward the Red Planet, Stanton said, “This music is from ‘Syriana.’ It felt dire and Middle Eastern and forlorn, like a culture clinging to its nobility.” Giacchino nodded again. “I don’t think we have to marry that to the John Carter theme—just because you’re master of the high seas doesn’t mean you can’t have a separate theme for the ocean.” Stanton glanced over anxiously.

“I agree,” Giacchino finally said. “But there might be a way to link them together at some point. Just as, while you would want to keep the Mars theme and the Therns theme separate, you could have the Mars theme in choir at one point, to suggest how the Therns are taking over the planet.”

“Great!” Stanton said, relieved: someone who got him and could plus him.

They watched Taylor Kitsch soar up to save Lynn Collins as she fell from her airship—the Superman catch—and the newly met couple then carve up an enemy platoon. “Do you have a take where Lynn isn’t smiling when she says, ‘Let me know when it gets dangerous’? ” Giacchino asked. “She just met the guy. Why would she be smiling playfully?”

“Mm-hmm,” Stanton said. He folded his hands behind his head.

“It was a bump in the movie for me.”

“Interesting.”

Afterward, Stanton told me, “I was mentally kicking my own ass, because I don’t think I have a take where she didn’t smile—and I don’t want my learning curve to be the reason a scene doesn’t work.”

He went on to acknowledge a deeper anxiety: “John Carter” faced a test screening the following night in Portland, Oregon, before four hundred citizens and five of Disney’s top executives. He was hoping that the lorazepam he’d take to palliate the flight north would keep him tranquillized for the duration. “If there’s anything looming as a threat, it’s this medium,” he said. “Because if, worst-case scenario, there’s some story line or motivation that seventy-five per cent of the people aren’t getting, I don’t have many options, other than cutting it out. If I can’t cure the tumor, in a way I’d rather not know it’s there.” He twisted in his chair, brooding. “I’m only as good at solving problems as I have the ability to do something about them—and it makes me so mad.”

For years, Stanton believed that the original Braintrust—Lasseter, Stanton, Docter, and Joe Ranft (who died in 2005)—did much better work together than any of them could do solo: they were like the Beatles. “Pixar is the healthiest place to be,” he said, “because our movies got famous, not the moviemakers—which bought you time to continue your work for a few years before you became a total asshole.”

Yet he also wondered if he would ever escape Lasseter’s shadow. “Even on ‘Toy Story,’ my ego kept wanting to see how I’d do on my own,” he said. “ ‘Finding Nemo’ was my first chance.” Like a stool, the idea required three legs to stand. “I’d always wanted to do the ocean in animation, and I was fixated, as a child, on my dentist’s fishtank, which was embedded in a wall: what a weird way for fish to see humans. The missing link—What is this movie about? What makes me care?—came on a walk to the park with my five-year-old son, Ben. That was when I realized that my anxiety—I kept cautioning him—was making me a terrible father.” Stanton worked up an idea about an anxious clown fish, Marlin, whose son, Nemo, defiantly swims out from the reef—and is promptly scooped up by a diver and deposited in a dentist’s fishtank in far-off Sydney.

Lasseter loved the pitch, saying, “You had me at the word ‘fish,’ ” and Stanton began pre-production in 1999. But Ed Catmull, Pixar’s president, says that problems soon became apparent: “Andrew is phenomenal at pitching, but the pitch isn’t going to end up onscreen. And the tank story was really derailing him.” In the dentist’s tank—which looked exactly like the aquarium in the office of Stanton’s childhood dentist—Gill, a Moorish-idol fish voiced by Willem Dafoe, becomes a surrogate father to Nemo. But no matter how Stanton rejiggered the subplot it kept stopping the movie: there was no emotional payoff. And the delayed revelation of the source of Marlin’s anxiety, the barracuda attack, “was absolutely not working,” Lasseter says. Lee Unkrich recalls, “Andrew wanted to be arty in the storytelling. He was trying to be fiercely independent and prove himself. But I know he was finding it hard to come in to work, because he feared, ‘This is the film that’s going to take Pixar down.’ ”

Stanton told me, “I just felt, I suck, I suck, I suck, and they’re going to replace me.” One morning over the Fourth of July holiday in 2001, while he was visiting his parents in Rockport, Stanton woke before dawn and wrote a mission statement. He admitted to himself that he’d been at once stiff-necked and craven. “Try to get fired,” he wrote, as a corrective. “Don’t be concerned about box office, release dates, audience appeal, Pixar history, stock prices, approval from others.” He added, “You have a gift for looking at the world with a child-like wonder. . . . You lose that and you lose it all.” After this reckoning, he began to ask colleagues for help, and the main thread of the film, Marlin’s quest for Nemo, finally came together: kids thought it was hilarious, and adults found it almost unbearably poignant. With that solved, the fishtank subplot suddenly became only a minor interruption to the over-all flow.

“What I realized,” Stanton told me, “is, ‘Fine, I’m not an auteur. I need to write with other people, I need people to work against. It’s not about self-exploration—it’s not about me—it’s about making the best movie possible.’ And as soon as I admitted that, it was amazing how the crew morale pivoted and suddenly everyone had my back. If you own the fact that you don’t know what you’re doing, then you’re still taking charge, you’re still being a director.” Aware of the irony, he added, “I learned that from John on ‘Toy Story’—every time he got confessional, and said, ‘Guys, I think I’m just spinning my wheels,’ we’d rise up and solve the problem for him.”

At the end of his Independence Day memo, Stanton pasted in a recent note from his journal—“Remembered how my father always would pick lint out of our rug by hand. Always trying to perfect things”—and reminded himself to maintain that paternal habit. One of the most Stantonesque moments in “Nemo” is when Gill describes his intricate escape plan: after the dentist transfers the fish to individual baggies to clean the tank, “we’ll roll ourselves down the counter, out the window, off the awning, into the bushes, across the street, and into the harbor. It’s foolproof!” The film ends with a coda in which Gill and his tank mates have executed the plan—and are now bobbing in the harbor, stuck in their baggies. “That’s life in a nutshell for us,” Stanton told me. “There’s always something you haven’t thought of. It’s never-ending.”

Before the “John Carter” test screening, Stanton and the Disney execs chatted casually, everyone looking relaxed in sweaters and jeans, pageantry that fooled no one. Rigid despite the lorazepam, Stanton waited for the film to begin, then waited through a long scene of exposition for the first expected laugh. It came, and it was loud. “I realized, O.K., they’re with me,” he said. “Then they laughed at anything that was meant to be a smile. There was no fidgeting in the air battle with Dejah, the least-finished part of the film, and I was thinking, O.K., just get them to the kiss, because I’ve always been very confident about the last third. And there was applause at the end!” A robust seventy-five per cent of the audience rated the film as excellent or very good—the vital “top two boxes” score—a number that Disney’s lead marketer said they’d round up to at least an eighty, because the work was so unfinished. The film had scope and humor and gusto, and you could feel—barring a few niggles about the precise workings of superhero physics—a bounding imagination at work.

The following afternoon, Stanton sat in his red office chair with his feet propped against the wall, weary but pleased. “In the late eighties and early nineties, when Disney animation was at its height, with ‘The Little Mermaid,’ ‘Aladdin,’ ‘The Lion King,’ and so on, I used to joke, ‘How come they always name their movies after their most boring characters?’ I skirted that problem with ‘Nemo,’ did just fine with ‘Wall-E’—and unanimously, in the focus group after the screening, they all said John Carter was their favorite character. And their favorite scene was the Warhoon attack”—in which Carter single-handedly takes on a savage tribe that threatens Dejah, while in intercut flashbacks we see him reckoning with the loss of his family on Earth. The sequence, laced with fatherly tenderness and grief, was a “make me care” moment original to Stanton. It elegantly elaborated his initial one-sentence distillation of the movie: “We survive to fulfill our purpose for others.”

Obstacles to complete fulfillment remained, naturally. The focus group felt a sag in the middle, was puzzled by the Therns’ motivations, and felt unprepared for Carter and Dejah’s wedding at the end. In August, as Stanton was in the midst of trimming half of the Thark temple scene he’d so painstakingly reshot, he flew to London to film Sab Than (Dominic West) having a clarifying conversation about the Thern plot. Then he flew to Los Angeles to film an insert he’d written in which Carter proposes to Dejah. Then he flew back to London to shoot the other half of the Thern conversation with the other actor, Mark Strong. So there was a second reshoot, after all, done piecemeal around the globe. “It still makes no fucking sense to me, but this is how we do it,” Stanton said. Disney’s Sean Bailey told me, “What I admired about Andrew was there was zero complacency after that very good screening. He was relentless in coming out of it and saying, ‘Here are the things I can still improve.’ ”

Stanton had been hoping a successful screening might earn him a green light for the second film, but, he said, “Disney didn’t—and won’t, history tells us—have the balls to commit” until they see how “John Carter” does. If he wants to continue serving as a planetary mythmaker, the studio’s investment will have to be amply repaid. “There were hugs and handshakes all around, but there was no ‘Conquering hero!,’ ” Stanton said. “It was ‘We got a lot to do—let’s get back on the horse.’ ” He sharpened his forelock in readiness. “Which, frankly, sadly, is the feeling I give off to others, so no surprise I get the same feeling back.” ♦

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